[Gretl-users] strptime() and Win vs Unix

Dear all, a student of mine just let me know that he has problems with the yahoo_get package on windows, when it comes to downloading data before 1970. This is a consequence of the fact that our strptime() function behaves differently on linux and windows. For example, the code <hansl> x = strptime("1964-05-11", "%Y-%m-%d") </hansl> returns generate a value for x that is -178074000 on linux but -1 on windows. more generally, windows truncates any date prior to 1970 to -1. Of course, writing a workaround for the affected package is relatively simple, but shouldn't we address this inconsistency? Or this is not for us, and we should just mention this fact in the docs? What do you think? ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti -------------------------------------------------------